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Ha! “Taxi to the Dark Side” won the Oscar award for best documentary feature. I saw the film last week at a National Archives screening; it is an excellent, thorough, unflinching look at the dark side this administration has turned our country towards.

And we have done better, in more dire circumstances. In accepting the award, director Alex Dibney dedicated the film to Dilawar, the young man who died at American hands in custody in Bagram, but also his father, noting that “My father, a navy interrogator … urged me to make this film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law.” As the credits roll at the end of the film, Dibney added a shot of his father saying so. I remember a Washington Post article from last fall where veterans of a World War II interrogation team based in the District made similar remarks.

Naturally, the award was presented to weirdly inappropriate triumphal music, and a clip of Afghans gazing skyward in awe as B-52s circle overhead. But whatever. On a final note: hey, nice going, Discovery Channel! How does it feel to be the a$$h0les who unloaded a documentary for “controversial content” just before it won an Oscar?

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NOTES: “noted” — Melbourne Sun, “It’s an Oscar for Eva” (Eva Orner was the documentary’s producer); “weirdly inappropriate” — ThinkProgress has the video of the award presentation and accompanying clip; “article” — “Fort Hunt’s Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII,” Petula Dvorak, 10/6/07: “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture.

An occasional review of further developments in stuff I’ve written about before.

Discovery is more than the name of their company…, 02/12/08 — “Taxi to the Dark Side” is an Oscar-nominated documentary about torture and other human rights violations by the United States in the wake of 9/11. After acquiring the rights to the movie, the Discovery Channel got cold feet and announced it might not air the documentary, saying the “film’s controversial content might damage Discovery’s public offering.”

Now ThinkProgress reports that one day before the Oscars, Discovery has sold the movie to HBO, which has said it will be airing it on pay TV in September, and on basic cable in 2009. I suppose it’s better than nothing, but I don’t see pay TV as a particularly promising mass release method for this movie… unless, of course, that’s organized in September. McCain gets mixed reviews in the movie, as well he might — against torture, but for throwing away the key — so I could imagine this being a campaign/cultural event after all.

Kiriakou: apologist or whistleblower?, 12/23/07 — When ex-CIA man John Kiriakou showed up on ABC confirming that the U.S. had engaged in waterboarding, it was a revelation quickly followed by a criminal investigation into whether he had revealed state secrets. But at the time I wondered whether the investigation was serious — Kiriakou’s statements fit comfortably within the “24″ scenario, since he claimed valuable intelligence had been gained.

As is well known, CIA chief Michael Hayden subsequently also confirmed that three men — Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim Nashiri — have been waterboarded. In Google searches since then, the dog that hasn’t barked is any further development in the criminal investigation. Kiriakou is slated to appear at the University of Pittsburgh on the topic of “Ethics in Intelligence.” The notice is subheadlined with what seems like the intended takeaway from the affair: Controversial waterboarding technique “probably saved lives, but was a form of torture.”

Some good news, anyway: …. Adel Hamad released, 12/14/07 — Adel Hamad, the Guantanamo detainee from Sudan who regained his freedom late last year, is continuing to press his legal case against the United States, suing for compensation for his 5 year detention — during which one of his daughters died for lack of medicine his wife couldn’t afford any more. The Christian Science Monitor’s Scott Beldauf reports that Hamad nevertheless isn’t just suing for the money:

We don’t want animosity, we just want to respect America again,” says Hamad, speaking in English phrases he learned while in prison. “The American conscience and the American people need to return to the great concepts established by the Founding Fathers, of freedom, democracy, equality, and justice. All these values and even the justice system are being shaken, played with.”

Released Sudanese detainee Salid Mahmud Adam was also interviewed:

Asked about the nature of his treatment by Pakistani police, and by Americans at Bagram and Guantánamo, Adam becomes vague. When pressed, he recalls the constant light and noise that deprived him of sleep, beatings, tear gas, pepper spray, attack dogs, the desecration of the Koran, and the “degrading” personal searches in which he was forced to expose himself in front of other men.

“Most of the soldiers there, I doubted they could be from a great nation,” Adam says. But sometimes he would meet an educated soldier, who would “deal with us quietly, kindly,” until that soldier would be ordered to “change his style of treatment.”

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NOTES: “film’s controversial content” — ThinkProgress; Christian Science Monitor item on Adel Hamad via Project Hamad

…it may be the very opposite of what they’re doing.

The Silver Spring, Maryland based Discovery Channel bought the rights to “Taxi to the Dark Side“, a documentary by Alex Gibney investigating the 2002 torture killing of the Afghan taxi driver Dilawar at Bagram Air Base, and the policies that led to it. (Dilawar was chained to an overhead wire, and his legs were subjected to such repeated and heavy beatings and kneeings that the medical examiner described them as “pulpified.”) A trailer for the movie can be seen here; it was shown during the AFI Silverdocs Festival in Silver Spring last year.

Now ThinkProgress reports that the documentary channel heavyweight is dropping plans to air it, apparently claiming the film is “too controversial,” despite the high praise and accolades the film has received, including an Oscar nomination. In an interview with ThinkProgress, Gibney comments:

Torture, even though the Bush administration never uses that word, they say “We don’t do torture,” because they define it out of existence.

He didn’t add that they don’t need an (alleged) documentary television channel’s help with that. The subject matter of this film could not have come as a surprise to the company. Under those circumstances, buying it, promising to air it, and then reneging on that promise would be an act of censorship that should rebrand the company. Dibney: “In refusing to air the film, Discovery is perpetuating what has become the policy of this government: It is OK to employ torture, just not to show it.”

The Washington Times’s Jennifer Harper quotes a “source close to the situation” as claiming “These statements are both premature and unfounded. A final decision on airing this film by Discovery Communications has not been reached yet.”

I hope they’ll make the right decision — or undo a wrong one. The Discovery Channel and the local AFI Silverdocs festival will lose a lot of their luster if Discovery follows through with smothering a timely documentary — and if activists mobilize to protest that.

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NOTE: I’ve posted about Dilawar’s case here and here (“Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny.”) The leg-beatings were called “compliance blows” using “peroneal [muscles and tendons attaching to the knees] strikes.” As I wrote at the time: “”Compliance blows” doesn’t sound like bad-apple-talk, it sounds like Pentagonese, don’t you think?”

• Terror Database Has Quadrupled In Four Years: U.S. Watch Lists Are Drawn From Massive Clearinghouse, Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, 3/25/07
• City Police Spied Broadly Before G.O.P. Convention, Jim Dwyer, New York Times, 3/25/07
• My National Security Letter Gag Order, Anonymous, Washington Post, 3/23/07
• Justice Dept. to Examine Its Use of NSA Wiretaps: Review Won’t Address Program’s Legality, Dan Eggen, Washington Post, 11/28/06

Ulrich Mühe in The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen).

I saw the Oscar-winning German movie “The Lives of Others” yesterday, about the surveillance of a fictitious playwright Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch) by East German “Stasi” operative Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe).

The movie — written and directed by relative newcomer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck — succeeds completely in immersing its audience in the fear and omnipresence of the East German surveillance state. The infamous “Stasi” — “Ministerium für Staatssicherheit,” or department of state security — was ruthless, efficient, and perhaps above all else huge, with an estimated 91,000 employees by 1989 — and an additional 100,000 informers on its rolls. Conceiving itself as the “sword and shield” of the state, the Stasi relied on intensive surveillance, lengthy interrogations, secret imprisonments, and that vast network of informants — called “inoffizielle Mitarbeiter” or “IM”: unofficial co-workers — to suppress and deter political opposition.

Von Donnersmarck brings a humanistic sensibility to the story; indeed, he says the germ of the movie is not what those who’ve seen the movie might have expected. Instead, it’s the playwright’s moody, sad performance of a lovely piano piece on hearing of the death of a good friend — with the Stasi agent listening in via bugs and electronic equipment. Turning to his girlfriend, the man asks, Could someone listening to such music — really listening — really be a bad person? That in turn was inspired by a story about Lenin related by Maxim Gorky; Lenin, said Gorky, once confessed that he was no longer willing to listen to Beethoven’s “Appassionata,” or he’d just be telling people loving banalities and stroking their heads, instead of pitilessly striking those heads to complete his revolution. Von Donnersmarck resolved to, in effect, force Lenin — in the form of Stasi agent Wiesler — to really listen to that music.

One might argue that’s nice, but potentially also a weakness of the story. Would a top East German security agent really respond to the pathos of a piano piece quite the way Wiesler does? And so what if just one did?

Yet Von Donnersmarck’s script and Mühe’s acting at least make it plausible — a lonely man, rather idealistic in his own way, gradually realizes he may have less in common with his bosses than with his surveillance targets. And I thought it was interesting to notice that Agent Wiesler — in his capacity as an official of the surveillance state, to be sure — is in fact strangely, breathtakingly free to observe, to draw his own conclusions, and then to act on them as he sees fit. Freedom’s diminishment as a whole is achieved, in part, by giving people like Wiesler greater freedoms and greater powers — powers that are generally abused as intended, but perhaps sometimes, very rarely, used differently as well. Freedom doesn’t vanish completely — it shrinks to the size of a headset.

Ulrich Mühe — an East German actor who was himself surveilled, with his wife among the informants — was interviewed for the German movie web site, and asked how he prepared himself for the movie. His answer: “I remembered.” When asked whether the film succeeded in depicting an authentic picture of life in East Germany, Mühe replied:

In my opinion, absolutely. Althought the story is fictional, the film … was able to evoke the climate of repression very exactly (meaning above all without exaggeration). Dictatorship feels like that.

My point with the news items at the top of this post is not to claim the United States is the same as East Germany, but to suggest that we’re not different enough any more to suit me. (True, we have nowhere near the number of political informers in the US that East Germany could “boast” of, but we make up for that with any number of people who excuse and defend steps towards a surveillance state and away from liberty — unofficial state security co-workers indeed.)

Once the Stasi was up and running, it was too late for East Germans to do more than grouse about it — if they dared even do that. At the risk of sounding like Chicken Little or Cassandra, it’s better to nip “Stasi”s in the bud — restrict surveillance to the minimum necessary, prevent fishing expeditions or political abuse, insist on strict judicial and legislative oversight, resist expansions of state surveillance powers. In other words, we must remind ourselves that it is people, not governments, who are endowed with unalienable rights, and that governments are instituted merely to secure those rights — not to suspend, abrogate, or diminish them.

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NOTES: Damian TPoD (”Danger West”) was also impressed with the movie and points to a “Fresh Air” interview with director Von Donnersmarck on NPR; this is where I learned some of the background to the movie and about Mühe. For a couple of other worthwhile reviews of the movie see Roger Ebert and Anthony Lane.
EDIT, 3/26: “official” for “functionary,” fifth paragraph.

UPDATES, 3/27: This post is included in a NYTimes “EmpireZone” blog roundup of blog responses to the Dwyer “City Police Spied Broadly…” article. Unofficial — at least, so I assume — state security co-workers commenting there say it’s not so bad that police spied on demonstrators. (Ahead of a ruling party conference.) Also, in a second post Damian TPoD discusses the post reunification part of the movie — which Von Donnersmarck had to argue to keep.
UPDATE, 5/15: Huh. Kevin Drum can’t figure out why Wiesler might have protected his surveillance targets: “There was simply no serious motivation provided for this transformation. It was almost as if the writer figured he didn’t really need to bother.” I respond in comments.

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that Mexican writer/director Guillermo Del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” owes at least a nod of recognition to Ambrose Bierce’s classic short story “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” The first moments of the movie make clear that things may not end well for its protagonist Ofelia, a young, dreamy girl played with extraordinary assuredness by twelve year old Spaniard Ivana Baquero.

But Pan’s Labyrinth is different from “Owl Creek Bridge” in just how the world of imagination that Ofelia inhabits coexists with the grim world beyond — in this case, Franco’s Spain not long after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Her fairy tale quest — complete with the archetypal three challenges, a failure, a redemption, and a final triumph — is enthralling in its own right and a wondrous, illuminating counterpoint to the real world she, her mother, and her comrades endure. As a result, Pan’s Labyrinth becomes both a spooky, gorgeous fantasy and a serious meditation on power, evil, and resistance.

[Warning: spoilers follow.]

I had not known that after the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, some people fought on against Franco, all but forgotten by the rest of the world as it descended into war as well. Centered in the mountains of northern Spain — Galicia, Asturias, the Pyrenees — that resistance was hopeless but valiant and persistent, with fighting lasting beyond the end of World War II, and flaring weakly as late as the 1950s and 1960s. (For its part, Pan’s Labyrinth is set in the summer of 1944 — hiding in a cave, guerrillas read a tattered newspaper account of the Normandy landings.) In his acclaimed history of the Spanish Civil War, “The Battle for Spain,” Antony Beevor writes:

Those who had taken to the hills, ‘los hombres de la sierra’, having escaped from prison or labour battalions, formed small, scattered groups which could not communicate effectively. Yet the first examples of resistance to nationalist conquest had started from the very beginning of the civil war. In Galicia, where so many had escaped the brutal Falangist repression, groups had formed in the hills, especially the Sierra do Eixe. [...] Most of those in the south were annihilated in 1937, but in the north the struggle continued until the end of the war and beyond. When the Asturias front had collapsed in 1937, over 2,000 soldiers fled to the mountains and the nationalists needed to deploy fifteen tabors of regulares and eight battalions of infantry for many months hunting them down.*

This is the job — even the calling — of Vidal, the Franquist capitan in the movie. Del Toro is excellent at diagnosing him with a few economical shots (and Sergi Lopez is excellent at portraying him): Vidal impatiently glances at his watch as his new wife and stepdaughter make a late arrival; he vigorously polishes his gleaming boots; he admires himself while shaving with a straightedge razor; he meticulously repairs a shattered watch; he revels in machismo and confrontation, he forces himself to disdain pain or fear.

And he’s a monster. While it’s clear right away he’s not going to be a nice dad, he’s more fully introduced to the audience by brutally killing a peasant and his son in the mistaken belief that they’re partisans. (After he leaves the murder scene, another diagnosis: his lieutenants’ eyes meet, and one lifts an eyebrow and exhales a tiny little “puh” as in, “he’s a psychopath, but what can you do?”)

Here and elsewhere, Del Toro’s connection to the horror and comics genre provide this movie with a distinctive visual style. I lack a vocabulary for it myself, so I’ll call it the “wordless ‘reveal’ panel” I’ve seen in graphic novels like Maus — a symbolic, stylish still life or portrait that’s emblematic of the conflicts in the story: the captain slashing his reflection in a mirror, a guerilla leader appearing from nowhere in the woods after the soldiers give up their pursuit.

Del Toro has certainly created one of the most unsettling nightmare/horror sequences I’ve ever seen. Ofelia is given a piece of magic chalk to draw a door ‘anywhere she likes’; once she goes through the door, she’s warned not to partake of a sumptuous banquet she’ll see, but to simply get a treasure and return. When she opens the door she’s drawn, she finds the banquet all right — with a catatonic, pale ogre seated at the head of the table, its eyes on the table in front of him, paintings all around depicting it slaughtering and devouring babies. It is hideous, pure, blind, grasping evil — and it will not remain sightless or motionless for long.

Given that this scene is interlaced with a second one in which Vidal introduces a stuttering, terrified prisoner to the torture tools he’ll be reduced with — within the same walls that Ofelia has magically tunneled to her own confrontation with evil — one sees the outlines of Del Toro’s views. Power hoards, love spends; power torments, crushes, and discards, while innocence sacrifices; systems demand obedience and get it, for the most part; rare individuals choose freedom and honor, even at the cost of their lives.

And the allegories and fantasies of the story are important in making those points. I watched the movie The Illusionist a few months ago, and although I liked it, I still felt I liked the movie I thought I had early on better than the one I eventually got. Unlike that movie, Pan’s Labyrinth wastes no effort explaining its illusions, much less explaining them away. Rather, its fantastical, fairy tale elements just are; they explain and comment on its real world better than that world can itself.

I wonder if there’s another significance to the muddy, mossy, heathen elements of faun and fairy, Pan and labyrinth. In a story of innocence buying innocent life at the price of its own, set in Spain and told by a Mexican filmmaker, one might have expected mystic, ecstatic Christianity rather than the pagan allusions Del Toro uses. But the Catholic Church was part of the apparatus of oppression in Franco’s Spain — collaborating in censorship, monitoring who did and did not show up for Mass, and unabashedly celebrating Franco’s victory despite the many Spaniards who did not. Beevor writes:

On 31 March [1939] Franco’s armies reached their ultimate objectives. ‘Lifting our hearts to God,’ ran Pope Pius XII’s message of congratulation to Franco, ‘we give sincere thanks with your Excellency for the victory of Catholic Spain.’*

As the movie portrays, economically as ever, the Catholic Church sat at the well-laden dinner table with the Franquist captain, murmuring that one ration card per family ought to be enough. I found another item in Beevor’s book that seems germane to Del Toro’s movie. One Major Antonio Vallejo Nagera, a professor of psychiatry, concluded that

…the only way to prevent the racial dissolution of Spanishness was the removal of children from suspect parents to be schooled in nationalist values. In 1943 there were 12,043 children taken from their mothers and handed over to the Falangist Auxilio Social, to orphanages and to religious organizations. Some of these children were passed on for adoption to selected families, a pattern followed thirty years later in Argentina under the military dictatorship there.*

As viewers will see, at least this one despicable, miserable bit of history is turned on its head in Del Toro’s movie.

At the end of Pan’s Labyrinth, a fairy tale narrator speaks of humans leaving “small traces of our time on earth — visible only to those who know where to look.” Del Toro, in remembering the valor of those who resisted Franco’s regime, has shown moviegoers where to look. For that alone, he deserves thanks. To do it so beautifully and so imaginatively, he and his collaborators deserve admiration and applause.

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* ‘Los hombres de la sierra’ — Chapter 37, “The Unfinished War,” p. 421. Pope Pius message — Chapter 34, “The Collapse of the Republic,” p. 397. Children taken — Chapter 35, “The New Spain and the Franquist Gulag,” p. 407. All page numbers from the paperback edition of “The Battle for Spain,” Antony Beevor, 1982, 2006.

UPDATE, 2/20: Other reviews: Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post writes, “See it, and celebrate that rare occasion when a director has the audacity to commit cinema,” and Jim Emerson at RogerEbert.com calls the movie “one of the cinema’s great fantasies.”

An occasional review of further developments in stuff I’ve written about.

Babel, 12/4/06 — I really liked the movie, so I’m pleased the Academy Awards people nominated it for Best Picture, Best Director, and two Best Supporting Actresses including Rinko Kikuchi, who I misidentified as Yuko Marata though crediting her with a “really memorable performance.” It also got well deserved Oscar nominations for best original screenplay, film editing, and music score.

Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq, 12/18/06 — The appeal reads: “As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.” Last week that petition, signed by over a thousand military personnel, was delivered to Capitol Hill. From the LA Times account by Noam Levey:

When the campaign began three months ago, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow dismissed the first signatories as “65 people who are going to be able to get more press than the hundreds of thousands who have come back and said they’re proud of their service.” The 1,000 signatories still represent a tiny fraction of the military personnel who have served in and around Iraq since the 2003 invasion. But according to the group, those who have signed the appeal include about 100 officers. Approximately 70% of the signatories are active-duty military, while the rest are reservists or members of the National Guard, said Madden, who added that the group would not reveal the names of the signatories to protect them.

Employee Free Choice Act, 6/13/05 — This perennial progressive wish list item may have the best prospects in years. The measure allows for union locals to be formed once enough signatures are gathered — rather than via up or down votes notoriously susceptible to management pressure and bullying tactics. You can learn more about “card check” systems via American Rights at Work, and you can send your congressman a message you support this sensible measure via a AFL-CIO Working Families petition: “Some 58 million workers would join a union if they could. But, as Human Rights Watch has documented, employers routinely harass, coerce, intimidate and stall to block workers’ freedom to choose union representation. In fact, every 23 minutes a worker is fired or penalized for supporting a union.” The Senate bill is S. 842, and the House version is H.R. 1696; I’m happy to learn my congressman, Chris Van Hollen (D-MD-8), is a co-sponsor.

Security Council votes 12-0-3 for UN troops in Darfur, 8/31/06 — One of the three abstentions was China. Now that nation is signaling a slightly different stance — but still no real pressure. The New York Times is running the headline China’s Leader to Visit Sudan and Seek End to Darfur Conflict, with Howard French reporting that Chinese officials announced President Hu Jintao will visit Sudan in early February and “press for a diplomatic solution to the conflict in that country’s western Darfur region.” However, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said that, “while China intended to use its diplomatic influence to encourage a settlement of the Darfur crisis, it would not press Sudan publicly or threaten it with sanctions.”

Fair Share Health Care: canary in the ERISA coal mine, 12/15/06 — Last Thursday The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit upheld last year’s ruling overturning Maryland’s “Fair Share Health Care” law on the grounds that it conflicted with federal law, specifically the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). The Baltimore Sun’s Matthew Dolan et al report:

…A divided three-judge panel ruled that the state’s Fair Share Health Care Act was incompatible with federal rules that promote uniform treatment of employees.

“In short, the Fair Share Act leaves employers no reasonable choices except to change how they structure their employee benefit plans,” Judge Paul V. Niemeyer wrote for the majority, adding that such a constricted choice also violates the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA.

One of the three judges disagreed; Judge M. Blane Michael held that the law was “‘a permissible response to the problem’ of escalating Medicaid costs.” While the article reports that most Maryland legislators don’t want to revisit the legislation, Senate Leader Mike Miller is an important exception:

“We’re going to try to work around what the [court's] majority said and comply with the law,” Miller said. “But at the same time, we can’t allow 60 percent of Wal-Mart employees’ kids to go without health insurance and use the emergency rooms for care. There has got to be some relief for Maryland and the other states.

Emphasis added. And even though he counsels against appealing the verdict, I also agree with Sen. Thomas M. Middleton, a Charles County Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee: “First of all, Congress needs to loosen up the ERISA laws.” More on the 4th Circuit’s ruling another time, I hope. For now, I’ll just reprint dissenting Judge Michael’s final words:

Because a covered employer has the option to comply with the Act by paying an assessment — a means that is not connected to an ERISA plan — I would hold that the Act is not preempted.

Yes! Jiminy Christmas, that ought to be the ballgame — at least one judge gets it.

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NOTES: Fair Share court ruling via Steve Fine (”fineline”)
EDIT, 1/25: Judge Michael’s final words and my comment added.

“Children of Men” — directed by Alfonso Cuaron and based on a book by P.D. James — is that fine, fine thing, a British dystopia of the near future. Like “21 Days Later” and “Clockwork Orange,” (and “1984″ for that matter) it features lots of deferred maintenance, shattered glass, and blighted cityscapes; unlike them, or at least not very like them, it cherishes a small, tiny, good thing at the heart of its story.

But dystopias are basically misanthropic — people are bad, that’s why things are bad, get used to it. They may not quite function as planned when you try to leave a little bit of hope wrapped inside.

I haven’t mastered reviewing movies — at least not this one, certainly — without giving away important bits, so be forewarned.

The chief premise of the story — based on a novel by P.D. James — is that by 2027 human fertility has dropped off the table so completely — and so inexplicably — that the youngest living human is 18 years old. A variety of prior catastrophes, chiefly a flu plague, are mentioned in passing which may or may not be supposed to account for the infertility plague; taken together, it’s plausible the psychological effects are devastating enough that there’s a market in tastefully packaged suicide kits (brand name: “Quietus”).

The other premise, also not entirely clearly explained, is that Great Britain is in the grip of a vicious anti-immigrant crackdown — one that results in Warsaw Ghetto-like internment camps around the country. I have to say it’s a problem for me that the reasons for this are not quite clear — although maybe they never are. Under these circumstances, there would seem to be a growing need for labor from wherever it might be found; the animosity may have to do with the hints of a global economic depression, and/or ongoing medical quarantine measures.

It’s to the credit of the movie’s production and its lead actor — Clive Owen — that these objections, such as they are, don’t weigh too heavily as the story proceeds. Thankfully, much of the background is conveyed indirectly, without narration or other omniscient characters: a Quietus ad on TV, newspaper clippings on a desk, prevalence of rickshaws in downtown London, a charred, smoldering heap of slaughtered cattle. And Owen is good as a guy who at the outset of the film is just putting one foot in front of the other any more; it turns out he lost his son in the flu pandemic.

Maybe because I’m a big, big sap, I welled up in the scene juxtaposing all of this. In the middle of the “Warsaw Ghetto” uprising of an internment camp, Owen and his wards — a young black woman and an everyday miracle made holy again, her newborn child — make their way out of a shattered building. Despite the battle raging outside, the inhabitants crowd to the hallway to reach out to touch and glimpse the child, hardened latter-day centurions in full battle gear stand transfixed as the latter-day Mary, Joseph, and their holy infant walk among them. It’s an unforgettable bit of storytelling, and it’s worth the price of admission and whatever sleight of hand the story engages in to get you there.

That may be because it too clearly longs to make a statement about many bad things: anti-immigrant fervor, ends justifying means, man the killer ape, and an environment badly enough off its hinges that it has apparently gone ahead and bit the hand that pollutes it.

And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

I saw a singular and very affecting movie on Saturday: “Babel,” directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu (”21 Grams”) and written by Iñárritu and fellow Mexican Guillermo Arreaga. It’s a hard movie to describe without telegraphing outcomes; the tag line “if you want to be understood, listen” is a good one, but doesn’t do it full justice.

“Babel” reminds me a lot of the 2000 Steven Soderbergh movie “Traffic,” about the interlocking fates of people affected by the drug trade and drug policy. In the case of “Babel,” the inanimate thing touching every family’s life in the story turns out to be a high-powered hunting rifle that comes into the possession of a Moroccan shepherd and his sons. Unlike “Traffic,” though, this .270 caliber thing serves as a catalyst and symbolic indicator of tragedy and emptiness — why was it there? why was its victim there? — rather than the ever-present, looming cause of temptation and despair that cocaine is in Soderbergh’s movie.

What remains the same is the sense that a global culture is failing everyone touched by it; what is different, on reflection, is that Iñárritu and Arreaga do, in the end, depict those failures falling unequally harder on the poor and relatively powerless. To this extent, it’s maybe even an answer to “Traffic”; the American husband and wife (Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, in nicely done performances), for example, for all that they face a supreme test in Morocco, are also in some measure responsible for another one faced by their children and nanny a few days later on the U.S.-Mexican border, one that winds up having consequences at least as serious as their own.

The movie is driven by tragedy (a mother’s death, a child’s, a baby’s — two as backstory, one as wrenching climax), near-tragedy, and the threat of tragedy. But it redeems its draining — and I mean white-knuckle draining — moments with deeply moving grace notes: people transcending barriers of incomprehension by unforgettable, simple acts of humanity, mercy, and love. A hashish pipe is given like a blessing; a father squeezes his naked, deaf-mute daughter’s hand (played by Rinko Kikuchi in a really memorable performance); a marriage reconciles over a bedpan; a brother risks his life to surrender; a policeman hugs a desperately sad and lonely girl; two men share photos of their kids. And it also redeems those moments, in a way, with the “rage against the machine” and human folly it expresses without being strident about it. Internalized, institutionalized fear and exploitation; selfishness; the petty humiliations inflicted by authority: they grate all the more by contrast with their opposites. You can be like this, or you can be like that.

Aside from all this, it seems to me to be a visually exceptional movie; the director and his camera crews find beauty and recreate well-observed slices of life in the austere Moroccan desert, the neon Japanese cityscapes, the technicolor cities and countryside of Mexico. And the global electronic village, too: the serene beauty of a helicopter rescue flight is ended, jarringly, by the babble and crush of news teams signifying nothing.

You won’t find an easy truth to distill from “Babel”; it’s worth seeing because you’ll wonder what it was about and what it’s saying. After reading the Bible passage above, going back over the movie in my head, and at the risk of being trite, I’ll offer a different tagline: all you need is love. Maybe not a bad message to spend an evening on.

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UPDATE, 12/13: David Denby (The New Yorker) is unimpressed: “My friend Herbert was rude to his mother last spring, and, some time later, Mt. St. Helens erupted. And three girls I met on the Central Park carrousel were kicked out of school for smoking, and the price of silver dropped by forty thousand rupiah in Indonesia. With these seemingly trivial events from my own life, I illustrate the dramatic principle by which the Mexican-born director Alejandro González Iñárritu makes his movies.” Cate Blanchett talking to Roger Ebert: “In every scene, there is somebody who doesn’t understand what somebody else is saying. That puts the audience in the position of knowing more than the characters, because we can read the subtitles and they can’t.” Almost every scene, but good point. Ebert describes the movie as a “powerful group of interconnected stories.”

EDIT, UPDATE, 1/24/07: Rinko Kikuchi, not Yuko Marata; she was rightly nominated for an Oscar, as was fellow supporting actress Adrriana Barraza (the nanny), director Inarritu, and the film itself .

As I’ve mentioned, I had a chance to see “An Inconvenient Truth” last weekend, and want to share a few thoughts about it.

First and foremost, it is a must-see movie; well done, persuasive, honest, and as many have mentioned, surprisingly watchable for being a slideshow, however whiz-bang that presentation may be. And that’s because it isn’t just a whiz-bang slideshow, but one designed to (paraphrasing Gore) “explode one barrier after the other in people’s minds” standing between them and taking global warming seriously enough to do something about it. Gore has researched, refined, rehearsed, and brought his facts and arguments to the public perhaps a thousand times, and the result is honed to razor sharpness.

But the slideshow is also spliced to a documentary about someone who is driven to show that slideshow over and over again. It’s that marriage of facts and someone who won’t quit working to teach those facts that is both persuasive and inspiring.

The struggle I’ve had in thinking about the movie is whether or not to view it in the context of Gore’s political past and future. In one sense, it’s a silly question. This is Gore’s political future, whether it leads him to a White House bid or not. There’s more than one way to have an impact on the national politics, and Gore has found a great way to maximize his own impact right now, regardless of what comes next.

The question is, what should come next? Would a return to politics distract from or sully the cause of educating the public about this issue? Maybe. But suppose Gore is right in predicting to David Corn, “Six months from now … you and I will agree that the period between the spring and the beginning of winter was a period when the country changed dramatically on global warming. Now, I have felt in times past that we were close to a tipping point, and I’ve been wrong. I don’t think I am wrong this time.”

Now, say he’s right — would that be enough? Might not settling for that be a premature declaration of victory — a “Mission Accomplished,” so to speak? It would be odd for Gore to work so hard to prepare the field of public opinion about global warming — and then leave the critical “harvest” of turning that opinion into concrete action to others.

So I think that, yes, this could be the opening salvo of Gore 2008 — and that there’s nothing wrong with that: the activist outlook of the movie itself demands it. And between Gore’s message, the efforts of others, and the steady accumulation of facts on the ground about global warming, there could be a voting public rightly ready and willing to entertain a “global warming” candidate.

“An Inconvenient Truth” could prove similar to the Douglas-Lincoln debates or Reagan’s nomination speech for Ford in 1976: a “Great Communication” planting the seeds for future victory in the ashes of defeat. If all goes well with the public opinion he wants to affect, Gore will have laid the foundation for a landmark, issues-driven presidential campaign that would be truly his own.*

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* What’s more, it’s not as if Gore has nothing else worth saying; he’s been a steady opponent of the Iraq war, and made a memorable Martin Luther King Day speech about Bush administration lawlessness.

An Inconvenient Truth

We’re in, tomorrow in Bethesda — thanks, Brett! More after I’ve seen it.

Here are some previous posts about global warming and climate change at this blog:

• Regional model CO2 rule on tap — without Maryland*
• Global warming, coming soon to a coastline near you
• Earth’s energy imbalance
• Earth’s albedo falling
• Every day is Earth Day
• Terraforming today
• …and, of course, Waah — Gore challenged professor 14 years ago

More valuably, here are some other good sites that are focused on the issue of climate change:

• ClimateCrisis.net – associated with Gore’s movie.
• Climate Crisis Coalition — the site has a climate news archive blog that’s good all by itself.
• StopGlobalWarming.org — political- and lifestyle-action oriented
• RealClimate blog — My favorite, an excellent blog by climate scientists. Not surprisingly, co-blogger Eric Steig has already reviewed the movie:

…it is an inspiring film, and is decidedly non-partisan in its outlook. [...]

For the most part, I think Gore gets the science right, just as he did in Earth in the Balance. The small errors don’t detract from Gore’s main point, which is that we in the United States have the technological and institutional ability to have a significant impact on the future trajectory of climate change. [...]

I’ll admit that I have been a bit of a skeptic about our ability to take any substantive action, especially here in the U.S. Gore’s aim is to change that viewpoint, and the colleagues I saw the movie with all seem to agree that he is successful.

In short this film is worth seeing.

Emphasis and knocks on wood added.

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* This is about the RGGI, or Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Maryland joined in later.
UPDATE, 6/1: Good article about Gore and the movie, “Gore Warms Up,” by David Corn. See also Tom Toles’ cartoon, and Gore ex-roommate Bob Somerby’s review and thoughts:

In parts of the film which we thought were too brief, we sit beside the Caney Fork River on the Gores’ Tennessee farm (You know? The farm that doesn’t exist? The farm which proved that Gore was “delusional?”) and Al Gore, speaking directly and quietly, tells us why he loves that river, the river he swam in as a child. For ourselves, we thought we finally understood something about Gore as we watched those fleeting passages: No one acquires that much erudition unless he deeply and massively cares. Al Gore cares about these topics–about the stewardship of that small river.